Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

Retrieval practice is all the rage, since research is clear that having to pull out information (language) from long-term memory reinforces learning. We always knew this really, and language teachers have long begun lessons with some sort of recap from previous lessons. The easiest activity is simply to ask students to translate words or chunks, preferably from the first language into the second. Here is another dead simple activity which forces pupils to retrieve from memory, but which keeps the class in the target language and involves the use of whole sentences (preferable to isolated words). Just give pupils a sentence to complete with a word or phrase of their choice. (You could specify in advance if you want one or the other.) After you give your sentence starter, pupils write down as many words/chunks as they can in one minute. They could do this on paper or a mini-whiteboard. After each round elicit a few answers, but move on quickly to the next example since the emphasis h...

In this low prep communicative task students have some fun miming everyday activities using high frequency language, while their partner has to use the verb involved in a different tense . It would be a good idea to model the task first, before pairs start to talk. Only do this if you know your class can manipulate common verbs in three time frames - so this may suit a Y10-11 class, or a very good Y9 (low intermediate). If your class needs vocab support display some of the words you see used in the list below. Here is a list you can hand out to partner A of possible sentences to mime: Je joue au foot Je joue au tennis de tables Je joue au golf Je joue au tennis Je joue au basket Je joue au volley Je joue à des jeux vidéo Je joue de la trompette Je joue du piano Je joue de la guitare Je joue de la flûte Je joue aux cartes Je joue aux échecs Je fais du dessin Je fais de la gymnastique Je fais la vaisselle Je fais du ski Je fais du jogging Je lis J'écoute de la musique etc etc (there ...

A quoi ressemble la famille en France en 2019 ? This is a lesson plan based on the communicative task "Ask and move" which Gianfranco and I described in Breaking the Sound Barrier. I think it's a good way to exploit texts which may be full of information, but not so easy to turn into a communicative-style lesson. A-level text books contain a good number of information-heavy texts to satisfy the AO4 assessment objective (cultural knowledge). So this task generates both communication and knowledge. The task comes from frenchteacher.net. Feel free to copy and paste this into Word. Time : 50 minutes.   Preparation : print off the 3 paragraphs on this topic (below). You can adapt this for any topic. Together these four paragraphs form a general description. Secondly, write and print off the 10 questions about the topic. Task: 1.     Explain the activity in L1. Three volunteers are ‘experts’ on family in France. Each expert has one of the three paragraphs...

Update: 11th June. The book has been proofed by Steve Glover and Nathalie Kaddouri of dolanguages.com, then re-proofed, edited and formatted by my wife Professor Elspeth Jones and we should be ready to publish on Amazon in a few days. We have around 185 pages of step-by-step lesson plans, some of which are linked to PowerPoint slides in a free page if frenchteacher.net. 20 lessons are for beginners or near beginners (CEFR A1), 20 for GCSE level (A2) and 10 for advanced level (B1/2). I’m pleased that the book covers a range of teaching methodologies, procedures and techniques. You’ll find elements of lexicogrammar (sentence builders and narrow reading/listening), oral-situational, communicative, task-based, audiolingual, even a touch of grammar-translation. There are plenty of photocopiable resources, as well as the PowerPoint slides I mentioned. I really hope this will be useful to French teachers learning their craft. The lessons are “oven ready” (sorry!) but can also be seen as model...

Here is an effective way to introduce and thoroughly practise the negative ne... pas with near beginners. This could take around 30 minutes.You could adapt this for use with other languages. Preparation: have about ten simple present tense sentences ready for display later. All are easy to mime. Je joue au football Je joue au tennis Je joue au ping pong Je nage Je danse Je fais du cheval Je fais du skate Je lance une balle Je regarde la télé J’écoute de la musique Here we go: Teacher starts by miming some simple activities whilst saying   je joue au football, je regarde la télé, je joue un jeu vidéo, je joue au tennis, j'écoute ma musique Do choral repetition of the sentences. Class could copy mimes for more fun. Display some of the examples and do choral reading aloud. Get a volunteer up to mime simple activities (sports are good) whilst you give a commentary: Elle joue au tennis Elle regarde la télé Elle écoute de la mus...